Autism: The Musical

Now, before you go thinking this is a completely random post, let me explain. Last year, I wrote a short story called Coping Mechanisms, and one of the main characters in the story is autistic. As I was writing the story, I did a lot of research and I've kind of developed an interest in reading about autism.

So, recently, I heard about this documentary, Autism: The Musical, and immediately Netflixed it to watch. It's about The Miracle Project, founded by Elaine Hall, and it's a drama program specifically for developmentally disabled kids. The documentary is about the six months before the first show, filmed in 2005 and 2006. The documentary focuses on five kids - Neal, Henry, Wyatt, Lexi, and Adam - all with varying degrees of autism and Asperger's syndrome.

What I like about this documentary is its immediacy, its realness. It shows these kids and their families as families, dealing with having an autistic child, but also just dealing with real life in general. While it certainly doesn't cover all of the positives and negatives of raising autistic children, it doesn't shy away from showing the problems along with the successes.

By the end of the movie, you are rooting for these kids to succeed, and you've had a look into their lives and see them not just as autistic, but as kids, too. The same crazy senses of humor, same anxieties, same desires.

I'd definitely recommend this movie to anyone, not just people who are involved in the autism community.